At yesterday’s SFBETA meetup, I had the chance to play with PicLens, a dynamic system for displaying images in your browser, all pulled from the APIs of various web sites.

It works as an adjunct to your existing browser, installing as a plugin (written in C++, or so the developer tells me.)

If you connect to a supported site, such as Google Images, Yahoo Images, Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug, or Deviant Art, and hover over an image, you’ll see a small play icon on images from those sites, injected by the plugin. Click the plugin, and you’re greeted with an absolutely gorgeous, high-speed 3-d/2-d browser that allows you to cycle through all of the images in that set in full-screen glory:

There is also support for direct RSS feeds, if you want to pull images from your blog directly.

The real impact of this system is being able to view so many photos at once. It rapidly exposes you to what these sites have to offer, and the search engine makes searching for recent events even more compelling. Additionally, there’s a search box in the upper right which can be used to search all six of the supported sites within the application, in case you don’t see what you like.

The application appears to be made of pure, futuristic goodness, with web2.0 reflections all over the bottom of the flying images, direct click and zoom selection of images, and really, this is what I expected the internet future to look like. Why do we not have enough 3d browsers?

Words are not going to do this app justice. Just download it now and check it out. It’s not supported in Safari 3.1 or firefox 3 yet, so you’ll have to run an older copy of your browser to use the plugin. Updated copies will be available soon for those browsers, so never fear.